Yes First Another Apology; Occupy Wall Street's Revolutionary Resurrection of Activism and Hope; Proposed Hospital Agreement Underscores Just How Powerfully We're Oppressed by Capitalism and Theocracy

Stephanie, spring 1971. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Details below in “Visual Thinking.” (Click on image to view it full size.)

*****

AGAIN MY APOLOGY for being so long away from this space, but this time the reason is wholly positive: I've become involved with Occupy Tacoma, the local manifestation of Occupy Wall Street, and I've been so busy as a member of its media working group I haven't given much thought to anything else.

To be once more so involved is an exhilarating experience, intensity of a degree I have not felt for 41 years – not since the immediate here-comes-the-real-revolution aftermath of the government's campaigns of murder and mayhem at Kent State University on 4 May 1970 and Jackson State College ten days later.

But now – in reassuring contrast to the tyranny of betrayals that followed the martyrdom of Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder at Kent, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green at Jackson (and let us not forget Kent's Dean Kahler, struck in the spine by a round of M2 Ball, permanently crippled and forever robbed of the infinite pleasures of sexuality and sexual love) – today's Occupation Movement may in truth be the rightful bearer of the title so arrogantly claimed by Wall Street: “too big to fail.”

The fact the Movement has gone international, that it is articulating the grievances and anger of our entire planet's Working Class – and most importantly that it is relentlessly militant while remaining implacably nonviolent – would seem to guarantee its sustainment.

Its unprecedented magnitude may even nullify one of the four hitherto-absolute historical prerequisites of revolution: organization, ideology, technological mastery and the support of a major (presumably invincible) foreign power.

The obvious question – a new question for a new time – is whether a movement that is genuinely global needs the support of any government.

No doubt we shall soon know the answer.

Meanwhile the welcome and profoundly healing sense of useful and purposeful commitment I thought I'd never feel again is marred – though only slightly – by what some athlete whose name I don't remember called “deja vu all over again.”

Just as I have seen happen in these parts before, the pacifists here tried to seize the levers of power at the very beginning and now try to censor any words with allegedly “military” connotations – the reason we are not allowed to “mobilize” but must “gather” instead – which guarantees Occupy Tacoma's communiques to the public are so non-confrontational, many of my neighbors assume OT is “just a band of left-over hippies.”

Never mind the hippie phenomenon died when 1967's Summer of Love turned into an Autumn of Death (both of which I covered), Occupy Tacoma astonishingly chose the two-fingered “peace-sign” – an emblem that long ago became a stultifying cliché – as its very own logo and now brandishes it as if it were cutting-edge art.

Exactly as my neighbors' reaction demonstrates, the resultant message is more suggestive of retro-rock than of political confrontation.

I cannot doubt this choice was at least subconsciously motivated by the we-hate-New-York-City xenophobia that is a big part of Puget Sound's cultural undertow. Whatever, there's no denying Tacoma's use of the peace-sign is deliberate defiance of the clenched-fist, militant-workers-of-the-world symbol employed by Occupy Wall Street and seemingly by most other such organizations including Occupy Seattle.

But this is merely my most recent encounter with the struggle that has sundered the U.S. Left ever since the 1960s, when it became more a bourgeois fad than a vessel of Working Class activism. The transformation, which the late Jack Newfield repeatedly decried, began with the devastating clash between the sneeringly draft-exempt elite (the petite bourgeoisie) and those of us who served, whether willingly (as I did) or because Working Class parents could not afford the college tuition that bought exemption from compulsory military service.

The result was a class-schism that lives on today, albeit mostly in more subtle forms. For example Occupy Tacoma's unawareness of labor – this despite endorsements from local unions – was painfully apparent during a recent discussion of potential demonstration sites, when Tacoma's industrial areas were omitted until I rather forcefully spoke out in favor of adding them.

(Tacoma is a seaport town of about 195,000 persons and – yes – there is still a lot of industry here. There is a lot of unflinching unionism too, especially on the waterfront.) 

After my remarks, the group proved its inclusiveness and intent by adding these locales to the list of places for informational marching. And plans were soon underway to invite more union members to participate in Occupy Tacoma's general assembly meetings and to establish direct communication with the unions themselves.

A problem I fear won't be so easily solved is the ongoing confusion about the meaning of the terms “pacifist” and “non-violent.” As a consequence the two are often taken as synonyms when in fact they are polls apart.

Pacifism, at least as manifest in the U.S., is too often an ultimate form of non-confrontational submission to authority and thus functions all-too-easily as camouflage for cowardice. By contrast, non-violence (note the examples of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) is implicitly confrontational while very deliberately avoiding any provocation the Ruling Class might use to rationalize unleashing its murderous powers of oppression.

Non-violent confrontation – precisely as Gandhi, King and Mandela have proven – is therefore the boldest tactic available to today's revolutionaries. Indeed – given the high-tech arsenals of death and surveillance the Ruling Class now owns – it is the only tactic.

But that should never excuse downpressing non-violent confrontation into non-confrontational submission. If the revolution fails (and I am 99 percent certain it won't), it will be because its own activists failed to comprehend this distinction.

*****

Medical Controversy Underscores Dangers of Capitalism, Theocracy

SEATTLE--A coalition of advocacy groups here worries the proposed affiliation of avowedly secular Swedish Health Services and devoutly Catholic Providence Health & Services will force Swedish facilities to adopt Catholic prohibitions against reproductive freedom for women and end-of-life services for terminally ill patients.

In response to this alarming report I wrote my first Internet contribution in more than a week:

Kudos to Crosscut and Harris Meyer for reporting on a pivotal issue Ruling Class Media is often too cowardly (or too controlled by closet theocrats) to adequately cover.

Now as a long-time (voting) member of Group Health, I wonder what reproductive and end-of-life rights might have been surrendered by its own alliances with Catholic organizations -- for example St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma or St. Peter in Olympia.

Apropos Group Health, I intend to learn – and publicize – the answers to the questions Mr. Harris evokes.

Meanwhile I would be derelict in my duty if I failed to point out that here is yet another example of the horrors of capitalism.

At its core, this issue is a byproduct of capitalism's innate opposition to human rights -- in this instance capitalism's denial of the absolute right to health care recognized by every industrialized nation save the United States.

The profound concern evoked by the pending Swedish/Providence agreement is also a logical reaction not just to Catholic authoritarianism, but to capitalism's traditional albeit woefully underpublicized preference for theocracy.

What used to be called "industrial psychology" -- psychology in service to workplace oppression -- long ago recognized the fact the most devout adherents of Christianity and Islam make the most dependably submissive, reliably anti-union employees. Note for instance the notoriously church-sustained anti-unionism of the Bible-belt South.

Thus we witness once again our worsening subjugation by run-away capitalism and its carefully hidden theocratic agenda.

*****

Visual Thinking: an Enchanting Woman of a Compelling Time

I met Stephanie in the City in 1969. I was hired in 1967 for an extended project photographing the people and neighborhoods served by the free clinic program of Manhattan's Beth Israel Hospital, she came aboard two years later as a member of the public relations staff. Though our roles were very different, each of us answered to the brilliantly competent woman who headed the PR department, which often brought us into the same office space.

Stephanie was formidably intelligent and uniquely articulate, and the more we knew of one another, the closer we became. Discovering just how very much we had in common via extended conversations over after-work drinks, we soon became a typically New York sort of couple, too mutually independent for formal commitment, too fond of one another to long remain apart, the beginning of an on-and-off relationship that lasted ten years.

Originally from Oregon, Stephanie returned to the West Coast a year after my Summer 1970 adventure left me stranded in Bellingham – a tragi-comic story for another time – and there we connected again. Not long after I made this photo, near Samish Bay at the south end of Chuckanut Mountain in April 1971, Stephanie bought two horses and a Model 600 Remington carbine in .308 Winchester and spent that entire Summer riding solo down the Crest Trail all the way from this side of the Canadian border almost to Mexico.

Later she became a Registered Nurse and worked for the United Nations in Latin America. Alas, we somehow lost track of one another in 1979.

The film, another of the negatives dug out from the ashes of the 1983 fire the following Spring, is Tri-X. I remember I exposed it at 400 but pushed it to 800 or maybe even 1200 with D-76 to achieve maximum midrange detail in some work pictures shot a few hours later in available darkness – probably fast breaking news or I'd have taken the time to load a fresh roll first. The camera was a Nikon F, most likely with the 50mm Nikkor f/2.

Wherever you are, Stephanie, whatever you might be doing, I feel profoundly blessed to have known you – the most fearlessly adventuresome woman I have met in this lifetime.

LB/12 October 2011

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Anti-Labor 'Leftists' Rage as Unions Take Wall Street Protest National; Barack the Betrayer or Obama the Orator?; Ceremony Proves U.S. Theocracy Is Real

East Village woman, 1967. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Details in “Visual Thinking,” below. (Click on image to see it full size.)

*****

ONCE AGAIN I find myself apologizing for prolonged but unavoidable absence from this space.

First a computer rebuild that was estimated to take two days required six days instead.

Next was an overnight trip to the hospital for diagnosis of back and chest pains that were (as I suspected) not cardiac in origin but were new symptoms of the steadily deteriorating spinal injuries inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitual drunks, a man who had been arrested at least 19 times for drunken driving – each charge dismissed -- before he slammed his Godzilla 442 Oldsmobile into the driver's side of my Bambi-sized Honda Civic and condemned me to spend the rest of my life shackled by increasing physical disability. Hence my most recent odyssey from Consulting Nurse to Urgent Care to Emergency Room to hospital bed. 

Finally, back home after this latest encounter with medical reality, there was the simple inertia of depression – that and renewed anger at either being on god's enemies list (if indeed there is a god) or at the very least exceptionally accursed by fate and circumstance.

As it says on the bumper sticker: “Old Age: It's Not for the Faint of Heart.”

While that's true of old age anywhere, it's an especially savage truth here in the Ayn Rand plutocracy of the United States of America, where transit riders are denounced as tax parasites, mass transit itself is condemned as welfare and dismantled accordingly, and the most selfishly malicious people on Planet Earth cheer wildly at the death of anyone – elders included – too impoverished to buy the nation's genocidally expensive health insurance.

*****

We Rise Up Angry, But the (Pseudo) Left Bares  Anti-Union Fangs

Organized Labor's decision to join the definitively anti-capitalist demonstrations that began in New York City and are now breaking out throughout the United States kindled such joy in my heart it literally brought tears to my eyes.

But my delight quickly turned to anger at the Ruling Class response. Despite a mass-arrest total reportedly approaching 1000 persons in New York City alone, Ruling Class Media continued a near-total blackout on news of this rapidly developing story. As of Sunday morning, the one exception was MSNBC, which began reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protest last week, when the participation of the Transport Workers Union and a number of other labor organizations expanded the demonstration into nationwide resistance.

The best source for updates on this new movement – which is growing with unprecedented speed and which I believe could (and should) give birth to our first nationwide general strike – is the website Occupy Together, linked above.

As if to underscore the intrinsic weakness of organizing via Internet, censorship by certain Internet service providers has already killed this link at least twice – your monitor will show “error 404 nothing found” – which means your only alternative might be to Google “Occupy Together,” with or without quotes.

(The server Yahoo has already admitted suppressing demonstrators' cell-phone transmissions, and I have no doubt the censorship will intensify as the movement gains strength and momentum.)

Meanwhile the earliest details of organized labor's official involvement in the Wall Street protest were reported by In These Times in a piece further disseminated by Common Dreams. As I wrote on the associated thread, “Never have I been so proud to be a union member and a New Yorker – even, as I am, a New Yorker long ago forced into permanent exile by gentrification.”

Alas, the majority of posters on that same thread expressed anti-union hatefulness of the breathtaking intensity we normally encounter only from the Right. Seldom have I seen a more vivid portrait of how the self-proclaimed “progressives” on what I call the “Pseudo Left” serve the Ruling Class as diligently as the Teabagger thugs or the diverse klaverns of the Ku Klux Klan.

As I replied to one such poster:

“The nastily bourgeois anti-unionism evidenced in your post – like the white bourgeois anti-unionism that toxified the U.S. feminist movement after its socialists were purged in the early 1970s – is a large measure of what brought us to Moron Nation and its slave economy.”

“But if we are going to save ourselves from capitalism – and now with the resurrected militance of labor I believe it might actually be possible – you are going to have to make the decision mandated by that anthem first sung by the Harlan County mine workers: 'Which Side Are You On?'"

Later on the same thread I elaborated:

“Whether it was the deliberate product of Machiavellian scheming or an accident of hostile fate, the Vietnam Era schism between the Working Class and the draft-exempt elite was the greatest gift ever handed the always-predatory capitalist aristocracy.”

“Indeed – exactly as evidenced in this thread – the division is at least as strong today as it was when George McGovern ran for president in 1972. It is measured not just in the exchanges here, but in the hatred and contempt with which those privileged enough to have been exempt from the Vietnam Era draft yet view those of us who served, a sneering anti-Working-Class malevolence expressed also in the anti-gunowner fanaticism and the anti-worker bigotry – particularly against loggers, miners, commercial fishers – that are litmus tests for membership in so many 'progressive' organizations...”

“But the joke is on those who continue to revile the Working Class. For the truth is in today's world – save for the coddled few who are part of the One Percent Aristocracy that owns and/or controls everything – we are ALL Working Class now.”

*****

Who Is the Real President – Barack the Betrayer or Obama the Orator?

Regardless of the outcome of the Occupy Together movement – even if it births a new political party (as well it might) – Barack Obama remains President, at least through 2012, which means a shift in his mode of governance as substantial as the one we are now witnessing should probably not be dismissed as “just more political bullshit.”

Nevertheless after the past two years I am literally afraid to indulge myself in any more hopefulness about his presidency. Of course I voted for him, but subsequent events have so obliterated my capability for political optimism, it has plunged again to its pre-2008 depth – the emotional chasm in which it had lain since it was sunk by the assassins who murdered John and Robert Kennedy.

Hence I am profoundly skeptical about the President's apparent conversion from Wall Street facilitator to populist firebrand.

Indeed I am once more convinced of what I said to my newsroom colleagues on the dreadful evening of 5 April 1968 – that “Robert Kennedy was the last politician in America who could have saved us from ourselves.”

Of course I applaud Obama's transformation. Better late than never – though I cannot but wonder if the President's new combativeness is yet another example of his genuinely Machiavellian flair for deceptive eloquence: in this case the utterance of compelling words albeit with the sure knowledge Republican obstructionism guarantees their message – and thus any threat to the Wall Street aristocrats who gave Obama nearly $16 million in 2008 – will come to nothing.

If this analysis is correct – if Obama seems to have turned against his original Ruling Class backers merely because it is politically expedient theater, if he and his financiers know his apparent about-face threatens no one save those of us it might dupe into voting for him in 2012 – we're once again being set up to be victimized by the Big Lies of “hope” and “change we can believe in.”

Nevertheless I hope – in fact I hope desperately, even prayerfully – my skepticism is mistaken, not the least because Obama the Orator is the Obama for whom I voted.

But after Barack the Betrayer's Wall Street-serving treachery in the critical matters of health care reform, Employee Free Choice and constitutional restoration, only a dullard would fail to ask “which Obama is the real President?”

And if the Obama we see today is indeed the real President, where the hell was he from 2009 until now?

The aforementioned financial data not withstanding, an African-American with whom I happened to converse recently astutely suspects the president was not only obstructed by his obvious foes – the racist Republicans and their Teabagger storm troopers (whose slogan might as well be “Keep the White House White”) – but was also sandbagged by closet racists in his own party and even in his own cabinet.

When I consider my acquaintance's hypothesis in the context of my own experience in the Civil Rights Movement – when I reflect on the inexplicable (but often carefully closeted) intensity of anti-black hatred not just in the South but throughout the United States – I begin to think he might be onto something.

And then I remember what another black man said to me a few weeks ago: that the average white's reaction to Obama is “see we gave them a chance and look how they fucked it up” – the N-word implicit in the subtle but telling twist of emphasis given the third-person pronouns.

Admittedly I have no idea how representative of African-American opinion my acquaintances' comments might be. But I have heard (way too many) whites uttering the “see we gave them a chance” syllogism, and I have also noted – with considerable trepidation – the looming backlash it implicitly threatens.

As to which is the real President – the Betrayer or the Orator – I can only speculate: a twenty-dollar word for guess.

Meanwhile George Packer of The New Yorker sums up the resultant political situation as succinctly as anything I've seen, this in a 9 September commentary equally valuable for its internal links.

“...Obama’s best hope will lie with the public. Do Americans still have enough faith in him, and in government, to give the President a second shot at reviving the economy? I’m not at all sure.”

In other words it's anybody's guess what's happening.

Though all Obama need do to clear up the confusion is openly side with the Occupy Together movement – which would also make amends for his failure to back labor in the Midwestern collective-bargaining fight.

*****

Notes on the Undeniable Reality of American Theocracy

Having too many times experienced the characteristic malice of religious fanatics, I am admittedly terrified by our creeping (and sometimes galloping) theocracy – the meticulously engineered, carefully imposed, insidiously clever thrust toward the ultimate tyranny of “one nation under God.”

Just as the Republicans openly cheer the extermination of people who are unemployed or otherwise chronically impoverished (though in the United States we murder by abandonment and neglect rather than in death camps of the sort that characterized Nazi Germany), the GOP also passionately embraces violent religious fanatics.

Because I am often mistaken for Jewish – especially when my native New York City accent was more evident than it is at present and my hair and beard, now mostly gray, were their original coal-black – I have witnessed firsthand the death's-head visage of Moron Nation's hatred of Jews.

Born in 1940, when circumcision was standard medical procedure regardless of one's ethnicity, I and a substantial number of my age-group peers were left uncircumcised in response to widespread terror the Republicans would win that year's elections and turn the nation officially fascist.

In 1943, when I was three-and-a-half, the war effort moved my family from the City to Jacksonville, Florida, where a gang of Southern boys a couple of years older than I but too ignorant to pull down my pants mistook me for a Jew and demonstrated their prowess as little Nazis and future Ku Klux Klansmen by holding me upside-down and burying my head in a playground sandbox.

A five-year-old girl named Mary Alice Shotwell – to whom my eternal thanks – stormed boldly to my rescue. Shrieking in fury, she pounded my would-be executioners with her fists until they fled.

I'm not sure what prompted her action or gave her the requisite courage – she was outnumbered at least four to one – but there's no doubt she saved my life. Perhaps she was motivated by the fact her parents were my father's friends – it seems to me Mary Alice's dad was a naval officer who worked with my father on matters of supply and logistics – or perhaps she had merely chosen me as a favored companion. I simply don't recall. In any case she quickly became my first true friend, though we were too-soon parted by the era's characteristic sudden changes of address for our friendship to stand any real test of time.

Now as I write this I wonder what became of her. I remember Mary Alice as slightly taller than I, a slender green-eyed blonde with long sun-bleached hair and softly tanned skin, a girl who always seemed to smell of Floridian summer: honeysuckle and salt air. I suspect in adulthood she was heartbreakingly beautiful – not the plastic tit-heavy Barbie Doll look so beloved of Moron Nation but real-woman beauty: a tall and slender danseuse, a young Veruschka as she might have been painted by Botticelli, proud of her femaleness and utterly confident of her relevance.

But I digress: friendship and – yes – a child's first love is so much more comfortable (and comforting) to write about than the anti-Jewish bigotry I've encountered nearly everywhere in the United States, even amongst my own maternal relatives, their prejudice especially evident in my mother's predictably venomous reaction to my several Jewish girlfriends.

Surprisingly, the same intensity of hatefulness seemed most common – even by comparison to the South – in Washington state, where the managing editors of daily newspapers in widely separate coastal cities rejected my job applications with nearly identical words: “we don't like your kind here...go back to New York City where you belong.” It is especially toxic in Seattle, the first and only place I have ever heard my birthplace openly referred to as “Jew York.”

But I have encountered many other expressions of religious bigotry too. I was in several fist-fights with the Protestants who attacked me – typically on Knoxville Transit Lines buses – merely because I attended a parochial school during the first half of the not-so-nifty '50s and was thus assumed to be Catholic. I was repeatedly harassed as a “pagan” and/or “devil worshiper” in the Everson/Nooksack area of rural Washington state c. 1987-1992 because I planted pumpkins and squash in with my corn, lived with two very large black dogs and never attended church. And I truly cannot count the number of such incidents that came to my attention during my years in the working press.

Hence we are dangerously foolish when we fail to list religious hatreds amongst the defining characteristics of the United States. Though such hatreds are now kept in check, they obviously await the opportunity to explode here just as long-checked ethnic hatreds exploded to destroy the former Yugoslavia.

Which is precisely why our national thrust toward theocracy is so terrifying: it institutionalizes religious hatred in exactly the same way Nazi Germany institutionalized hatred of Jews and Islamic governance institutionalizes hatred of all non-Islamic religions.

The frightening evidence our society is already imprisoned by theocracy goes far beyond the renewed legislative warfare against women and sexuality. Indeed the most glaring example I've yet encountered is the god-is-on-our-side preachment by Rear Admiral Margaret G. Kibben, the U.S. Navy chaplain who intoned it as part of an awkwardly long prayer to open and close President Obama's recent Medal of Honor presentation to Marine Sergeant Dakota L. Meyer:

“Almighty God...in accordance with your divine guidance, our founders established a nation rooted in the ideals of courage and virtue...we now yield to your direction for this country...”

Note not just the singularly Christian label for the deity, but the thinly disguised assertion the United States and its leaders are god's representatives on Earth.

As if to eliminate any lingering doubts about theocratic intent, Kibben closed the ceremony 18 minutes later by proclaiming it too of divine origin:

“God made this ceremony serve as a reminder of the responsibility that comes with receiving the grace gift of freedom.”

If, as it seems, the so-called War on Terror has already reshaped the United States into a garrison of born-again Crusaders, the rebirth of the Inquisition cannot be far behind. And that is exactly what the Christian fanatics intend.

*****

Visual Thinking: Poignant Hope in a Perilous Time

Long ago and far away amidst a Revolution in Consciousness that now takes place only in memory, during a pre-terminal-climate-change April with the chilly remnants of winter still resisting the warming gestures of spring, some of the youth of Manhattan's Lower East Side decided to clean up their local environment.

It was 1967. The clean-up's organizational work done by the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance – the local equivalent of a neighborhood association – and it soon led to a scheduled event called a Sweep-In: hundreds of young men and women hauling away tons of trash in a gesture they hoped would lead to solidarity between the bohemian community (which was already calling itself “the East Village”) and the traditional residents of Alphabet City – Avenues A,B,C,D – the 19th Century tenements of which then housed people who were mostly either Puerto Rican or immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The woman in this portrait was taking a break after spending most of the day helping clear a vacant lot of litter. I no longer have her name – those notes (like so much else in my life) were destroyed in the 1983 fire – but I see her now as an icon of the blessed hope that was once ours, a hope that may again be aborning in the Occupy Together movement.

I don't remember the camera – probably a VT Canon, maybe a Pentax H1A, whether the rangefinder or the SLR obviously (by the slight distortion of her facial features) mounted with a wide-angle lens – but there's no question the film is Tri-X, and the approximate date tells me it was developed in Diafine at 1200.

May we again have cause for such optimism as shows in this young woman's gentle smile.

LB/2 October 2011

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Coup Fears and Supercomputers Highlight New Banana Republic Lifestyle; GOP May Make Obama Jobs Speech a Con Job; What Perry and Texas Tell Us About Our Future

Small-town poverty in Washington state c. 1971; one of a series of pictures I made for the Whatcom County Housing Coalition and showcased as a portfolio piece. The associated negative was among the few semi-preserved in files dug out of the ashes six months after the 1983 fire; the white spots visible throughout the image are emulsion damage due to heat and water. Tri-X at 800; Nikon F w/28mm f/2.8 Nikkor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*****

THIS WEEK'S ESSAY will be relatively brief, and not because of a lack of material.

No sooner was I recovering from the early, nasty-surprise influenza that struck me down last week than it was time for the physically painful ordeal of cleaning this apartment from top to bottom in preparation for its quarterly inspection. The pain – the fact it hurts terribly to bend over and the corollary fact I will be effectively bedridden for two or three days after preparing for the inspection – is the result of the steadily deteriorating back injuries inflicted on me by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled alcoholics, a habitual offender who, when he rammed his car into mine in 1978, had at least 19 arrests for drunken driving – every one dismissed.

Meanwhile the inspections are themselves noteworthy. They are among the insultingly intrusive measures by which occupants of lower-income senior housing are repeatedly reminded how we are viewed by the Ruling Class: as failures (else we would not be low income enough to qualify for such facilities), and as hopelessly irresponsible (hence not only the mandatory inspections but – for example – an unwritten but nevertheless total ban on gas cooking in all such accommodations locally). 

The latter has forced me into constant combat with the culinary atrocities characteristic of an electric range – decades of seasoning irreparably burned off my three cherished antique cast-iron frying pans, the pans themselves damn near useless as a result, and everything now prepared in them charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Though I never considered myself a gourmet cook, making meals on the gas stoves of my former life was a pleasant and sometimes genuinely rewarding adventure, but now – thanks to capitalism's relentless hostility toward old people as expressed by restriction to electric burners – it's a chore hardly less repugnant than cleaning a refrigerator of contents reduced to reeking compost by long abandonment. My nutritional intake no doubt suffers gravely as a result, though I try to compensate by dosing myself with vitamin supplements.

But enough kvetching. At least I still have a roof over my head...a commodity that under capitalism becomes ever more in doubt.

*****

Coup Fears and Computers: Life in a 21^st Century Banana Republic

Originally I planned to lead with a story e-mailed me by my sister Elizabeth Bliss, to whom many thanks for a credible report the capitalist Ruling Class is developing a supercomputer that can reliably predict the intensity of socioeconomic oppression likely to trigger insurrection.

Presumably the new computer will give enough advance warning of impending rebellion, the capitalist aristocracy can either neutralize our rage with pseudo-humanitarian reforms or mobilize the soldiers and police to complete our enslavement.

But that wonderfully heartening news, for which see below, was shoved out of the top spot by an exposé from the Justice Integrity Project via Reader Supported News implying Obama Administration policies are influenced by terror of a corporatist and/or military coup.

“President-Elect Obama's advisors feared in 2008 that authorities would revolt and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama's top transition advisers,” said the Integrity Project report.

The dean, Christopher Edley Jr. of the University of California (Berkeley) Law School, was “the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama's administration,” the report said.

Voiced at a public forum earlier this month, the dean's disclosure “implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces (the president) is supposed be commanding,” the document concluded. “It suggests also that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history.”

If the account is true – and though it is in dire need of a competent editor, its turgid prose seems thoroughly credible – it adds yet another dimension to our understanding of how “change we can believe in” became the biggest Big Lie in U.S. political history and how the candidate of “hope” became Barack the Betrayer.

A real paranoid would thus presume the emergence of a new rationale for President Obama's treachery might be exactly the sort of temporary remedy suggested by the archons of Nurd who operate the supercomputers – such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Data Analysis and Visualization – that track and quantify our responses to oppression.

*****

Obama Jobs Speech: Many Promises, Few Rational Hopes of Fulfillment

The big story last week was of course Obama's jobs speech, but buried beneath all the Ruling Class Media boosterism was the fact the nation's two most relevant public intellectuals gave it mixed reviews at best.

Economist Paul Krugman  called it “bolder and better than I expected,” but added “it isn't likely to become law, thanks to GOP opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich  meanwhile asked the sort of questions real journalists would have asked were they anything but stenographers for the Ruling Class and propagandists for capitalism:

“Why did the President include so many tax cuts, and why didn't he make his proposal sufficiently large to make a real impact on jobs and growth?” Mr. Reich then answered his own inquiry: “Because (Obama) crafted it in order to appeal to Republicans. To get it enacted, he needs their votes.”

The third significant commentary on the jobs speech came from AFL/CIO President Richard L. Trumka, whom MSNBC reported was in the audience as a guest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

Mr. Trumka was optimistic but skeptical. “The plan announced by President Obama to create jobs is only the opening bid in a national conversation we’ve needed to have for a long time,” he said via an e-mail to the nation's AFL/CIO union members.

Then – no doubt to quell rank-and-file fears he had somehow been co-opted by Ms. Clinton's invitation – he quickly added a warning: “some politicians claim cuts to our social safety net, deregulation and lower taxes for the rich will fix our problems. But they’re flat wrong. If we continue down this road, it only will destroy more jobs and send us into a vicious downward spiral.”

The e-mail linked to a petition, Tell Congress:   Working families will judge our elected leaders by whether they act with integrity and energy to create good jobs now.  

While none of these three men are (yet) willing to concede that capitalism is evil incarnate – infinite greed as maximum virtue (and thus the implicit overthrow of every code of ethics or morality humanity ever uttered) – each is nevertheless a voice in the proverbial wilderness, a bold rebel who dares shout (some) truth in defiance of power. 
 

*****

And Beyond the Small Momentary Optimism, a New Prognosis of Doom

Alexander Cockburn  has long been one of my favorite columnists, and here with his customary lucidity he reads the omens in the jobs speech:

“You can find Amer­ica's fu­ture in blue­prints minted in busi­ness-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-lib­eral age: de­struc­tion of or­ga­nized labor, at­tri­tion of the so­cial safety net, ero­sion of gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and a war on the poor that will be fought with­out mercy at every level.”

“Texas, near the bot­tom in so many so­cial in­di­ca­tors, is the model: Rick Perry is its lat­est sales­man. But who­ever the Re­pub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date may be, they face in Obama an op­po­nent who agrees with at least half of what they say. In 40 years, I've not seen a gloomier po­lit­i­cal land­scape.”

LB/10 September 2011

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Labor Day 2011: Sickness as a Teachable Moment

An abandoned factory, its employees victimized by Throwaway Worker Syndrome, the merciless downsizing and outsourcing that accompanies the capitalist quest for profit. I made this picture in  2008, when I still had Leicas; click on image to see it full size.  Leica M2, 135 Tele-Elmarit, Kodak BW400CN, photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

*****

A Man on a Bus, His Maliciously Uncovered Cough Spewing Clouds of Infectious Virus, Is an Apt Metaphor for America's Anti-Union Workers 

I am sick as the proverbial dog with an unseasonably early flu, and the associated mental fog makes writing a seemingly impossible task.

Were it not for Labor Day I would make no effort to fill this space until my alleged mind was far less beclouded.

Yes I know the capitalist intent behind Labor Day is to destroy the socialist solidarity of International Workers Day – May Day or May First – which indeed the capitalists have done, this with an oppressive global triumph that has no counterpart in human history.

But capitalism's victory makes what I am about to say here especially relevant.

For now under capitalism how many U.S. workers  retain our former choice to stay home from work when we are sick?

How many of us are forced – under threat of job-loss – to go to work no matter how sick we might be?

Surely this was true of the man who vectored his nasty malady onto a Tacoma city bus ten days ago.

Huddled in his seat he was a portrait of impoverished misery, late 20s or early 30s, pale complexion, long stringy hair, embitterment clad in dirty jeans and a once-plaid shirt faded mostly dull green – his entire being a telling archetype of the Third World nation capitalism has made of the United States.

His cough, which I could feel on the back of my head, was deep and raspy with phlegm and sounded like it belonged in a ward for terminal lung disease. Finally after he'd coughed on me three or four times I turned in my own seat and growled “hey cover your mouth damnit”

“Fuck you, old man,” he snapped back.

His eyes boiled with pre-fight fury of an intensity I had not seen since the schoolyard brawls of adolescence. But my protest had emboldened other bus riders who now muttered in anger at his defiance of common courtesy, and he yielded to our solidarity. A couple of stops later he got off the bus. I supposed he was a back-room employee in one of the nearby low-wage non-union retail establishments.

And I don't doubt his defiantly uncovered cough was the source of the bug that afflicts me today.

But even now I cannot remain angry with him. I know what capitalism has made of this country we live in. I understand how capitalism's new paradigm of U.S. governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and murderous poverty for all the rest of us – has turned the loss of a job into a potential death sentence.

Last night though it occurred to me the man's behavior – his refusal to cover his cough – was probably not just thoughtlessness but deliberate aggression, as if he were saying to himself “I gotta go to work sick so fuck em I'll make everybody around me sick too.”

Which, if true, would make him just like the Teabaggers who say to themselves “well I don't have a union to protect me so I'll make damn sure nobody else gets to have one.” Or “I don't get no goddamn Living Wage so ain't nobody else gonna get that kind of money either.” Same with medical care, education, adequate transit, Social Security – every public service we can name.

Mutually enforced victimhood while the fat-cat aristocrats cackle all the way to their offshore bank accounts – exactly the Moron Nation mentality makes people join the war against unions – a war against themselves, genocide by suicide.

But at least on this Labor Day we can take heart in the fact some of us are finally waking up and organizing and fighting back.

LB/5 September 2011

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Unyielding Reflections of Purposeful Defiance: a Locked-Out Blog, a Fire-Damaged Photograph

W. EUGENE SMITH in Seattle, 1976. Details in text; click on image to view full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1976, 2011.

*****

What, exactly, am I trying to do here? What is the real purpose of Outside Agitator's Notebook?

The short answer is OAN serves the two Muses to whom I am wed – photography and journalism – and thereby (or so I hope) serves you the reader with reflective pictures and thought-provoking commentary on the week's news.

In a major sense OAN is thus a continuation of the award-winning op-ed column I wrote c. 1978-1981 for a mainstream newspaper that served a big suburb of Seattle. The paper, which died in the late '80s, was an almost-daily, published every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. But our editorial pages never included photos, which were generally taboo in the era's op-ed sections, and while it was ok to imply socialist leanings, I had to keep my Marxist tendencies carefully closeted.   

The main inspiration for the OAN mix – an eclectic blend of pictures and text whether political or personal – probably came from Jill Johnston of The Village Voice, who during the 1960s and through most of the '70s wrote a regular feature entitled “Dance Journal.” Ms. Johnston (1929-2010) was originally the paper's dance critic but defied the capitalist taboo against mixing art and politics, often (correctly) approaching one as the symbiosis of the other. Though her favorite medium was unquestionably text alone, I see in retrospect it was especially her influence that shaped my view of photography – indeed of visual art in general – as tragically weakened (if not reduced to meaninglessness) when divorced from its socioeconomic and political contexts.

Even now in the radically diminished never-again-a-Leica circumstances of inescapable geriatric poverty, photography remains my passion, and that so intense it surely deserves summation of its pedigree. Ergo: as I have noted before, I'm told the first word I ever spoke was “light.” But the real mother of my interest in visual art was my dear Aunt Alecia – Alecia DuRand (1909-1993), a Columbia University MFA and the first woman to chair a U.S. collegiate art department. My first cameras were gifts from my father:  a Kodak Brownie Reflex on my 12th birthday, an Agfa Press Miniature on my 14th and a Polaroid a year later when I turned 15.

Writing is a skill I learned on my own, though the process was much more haphazard, profoundly discouraged by mediocre grades in the exercises-in-tedium that characterize high-school English.

Nevertheless, probably by the time I was 16 (when I began keeping a journal), certainly by the time I was 19, writing had become a consuming intellectual exercise, though it never offered the always-seductive visually orgasmic Zen of photography. In fact my discovery of the difficult pleasures of text probably started as a quest for psychological compensation, a response to the trauma inflicted when my burgeoning interest in science – biology (specifically forestry) – was torpedoed by the dyslexia that so often reduced me to apparent idiocy. “Science is mathematics,” my father always said, “and you can't be a scientist because you can't do math.” My haughty peers in the youth group of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church painfully echoed his judgement: “Some people say ignorance is bliss; I say Bliss is ignorant.” (The religious schizophrenia of my boyhood years in Knoxville – Monday thru Friday the academically superb Roman Catholic Holy Ghost School, on Sundays the implacably hostile Unitarian youth group – is another story for another time.)

In any case, midway in my 15th year (and probably for all the wrong reasons), I decided I would be a journalist – a “newspaperman” as we said then. The very few occasions I wavered from that path were moments of overwhelming hopelessness, invariably relieved by circumstance at the last possible moment – or so it seemed until clinical depression drove me onto welfare. At that point the ruinous notifications mercilessly sent out by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services c. 1987 (in essence “Bliss has applied for nut money and we need confirmation he used to be employable”) destroyed my reputation (and therefore my career) beyond any possibility of repair.

Which – an oblique explanation of why I'm on Blogger and excluded from major media – brings me back to OAN and what obtains here.

Normally I spend the week collecting and evaluating what goes into this blog, then write the text and choose the featured photograph on Saturday for posting early Sunday morning. But the huge technical problems imposed by my ouster from TypePad – the necessity to learn the radically different software employed by Blogger (and to do so without any technical support) – literally stole the last seven days from my life.

Obviously, much of the OAN material is based on news reports. These news items always exceed the space available – this week for example I bookmarked 27 separate stories for consideration. But the struggles of the past seven days denied me the time to do the requisite reading, and after spending all day yesterday trying to catch up, I realized the task was hopeless. There was too much to absorb and not nearly enough time for the absorption. Maybe later this week I'll manage to post what should have been uploaded last night; maybe not, as the forthcoming days will undoubtedly produce more that demands comment.

Meanwhile – and surely to the detriment of my always troublesome blood pressure – I can't seem to stop boiling with rage over the obstructions themselves. Despite the tremendous help given me by a Blogger discussion-board veteran whose screen-name is Katley – to whom again my most profound gratitude – I cannot remember ever in my life having endured a week of such relentlessly bitter frustration.

Part of the problem is I genuinely despise computers: I recognize them as perhaps the ultimate expression of the capitalist Big Lie, and I therefore regard them with undiluted repugnance. Beyond the disinformation and denial that facilitates their imposition into all our lives, computers are not labor-saving devices – not at all – but are instead the ultimate Ruling Class power-source, alien machines perfected for job-theft and subjugation, the core vehicles of outsourcing, downsizing and the most brazenly cruel profiteering in human history.

Utterly appalled by this – appalled too by how computers originated as the essence of cruelty itself (that is, as war machines born to solve the riddles of making atomic explosives in furtherance of capitalist imperialism) – I'm also blocked by my dyslexic inability at the rote learning essential to computer operation. But whether we are dyslexic or not, computers convert our lives to a uniquely vicious game of Simon Says – a contest that in childhood I always lost and therefore hated. And now – through a twist of karma or the malice of some divine sadist – I am damned to endure it again, this time for the highest stakes of all. My struggles during the past seven days are final proof that no matter how long I am around computers, I will always regard them as expressions of malevolence, invasive technology that compels us to learn a mode of thinking so radically anti-intuitive it cannot but threaten our survival as a species.

It is a game that is always an ordeal, a game I cannot ever view as “play” because any sense of playfulness – or any vestige of the delight and the good humor with which I normally approach learning – is forcibly excluded by the process itself. A final twist of anxiety is added by the fact computer operation is conducted not in English but in Nurdish, a post-modern language for which there are no reliable dictionaries – no doubt because the core tenet of post-modernism is the absurd and morally imbecilic notion meaning itself has no meaning whatsoever.

What then – besides ranting like some unreconstructed Luddite – am I trying to accomplish with Outside Agitator's Notebook?

My main intent here is to illustrate and/or verbalize those socioeconomic and political suspicions we are too often afraid to say aloud, thereby showing dear friends and other dissidents they are not alone. Part is to leave a message for the future – assuming there will be any future – that even amidst the deepening darkness beneath the Obama Bush, not everyone in Moron Nation had been subjugated to zomboid ignorance and/or pathological denial.

Another objective is purely egotistical: to showcase what little remains of my work as a photographer, thereby perhaps regaining just a trace of the potential that was stolen from me by fire and the odium of its psychological aftermath.

This is problematical for two reasons.

One is the fact my photographic best is social-documentary photography, a medium prohibited by Washington state's vindictively broad definition of invasion of privacy. A late-1970s judicial ruling – as far as I know never successfully challenged – specifically bans publication of any photograph, even news photos made in public places, should the subject later find the image objectionable. Thus my clinically-depressed decision to return to Washington state in 1986 now forever forbids me from documentation of the savage material and spiritual poverty that characterizes the human condition under capitalism – and it was this purpose I am now denied that always shaped my photographic aesthetics and intentions.

The second and far more insurmountable barrier is that of the fire itself, the mysterious blaze that in 1983 destroyed at least 90 percent of my photographs, all my research files and nearly all my writing – including the book project to which, up till then, I had devoted nearly every otherwise-unobligated moment of my adult life. Eventually entitled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it was a 24-year project in investigative journalism, an analysis – profusely illustrated with photographs – of the sociological, anthropological and semiotic evidence that defined the 1960s Counterculture as the spontaneous first wave of a revolutionary transformation (back) to matriarchy.

Despite its final form, “Dancer” began with a single question. During my college freshman year, 1959, I wrote a proposal for a dual-purpose English and sociology paper focused on what seemed to me the glaringly obvious anomaly of the folk-music renaissance: why, if the United States was bound for an era of scientific glory, were its young people resurrecting the Western World's oldest folk music? Though the paper was never written, its central concern remained profoundly compelling, leading me on a pathway of research, discovery and learning oddly akin to the widening ripples that result when a stone is tossed into a pond, a process far more spiral than linear and – or so I've been told – curiously feminine as well. Eight years later I recognized the results as what I still think of as the untold news story of the century – “the resurrection of the goddess” (that conclusion not just emerging from my notes but implicit in my photography too) – and I thus started shaping “Dancer” into a book of pictures and text.

Other writers, among them Robert Graves (The White Goddess, 1948); Gary Snyder (Earth House Hold, 1969); Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, 1983) and the aforementioned Ms. Johnston (Lesbian Nation, 1973), had voiced similar arguments. But none connected the resurrection of the goddess-ethos to what the late Walter Bowart labeled “revolution in consciousness” – his breathtakingly apt description of the Counterculture's psychological wellspring.

“Dancer” was therefore, from the perspective of the Ruling Class, undeniably dangerous. It identified, combined, photographically illustrated and thereby potentially united the revolution's diverse currents – feminism (including the re-emergence of deliberate single motherhood); environmentalism (especially the Gaia Hypothesis); the Back-to-the-Land Movement (including the instinctively matriarchal structure of many communes); the anti-Vietnam War protests; the re-emergence of the poet as cultural leader; the revolution in aesthetics typified by rock poetry; the folk renaissance (which resurrected many lingering remnants of pre-Christian liturgy); and finally goddess-worship itself – shaping all these (and much more) into a hitherto-unnamed solidarity that might indeed have eventually spawned a Countercultural tsunami strong enough to sweep away patriarchy and thereby cleanse us of the psychological mandate for  capitalism.

Inspired by the findings that produced “Dancer” but still profoundly unwilling to publicly name the goddess (whether as symbol or reality it mattered not), I used the one-time pen-name Aengus L. Forsythe to write a 1970 Northwest Passage piece describing a fictional “crypto-radical seismology faction” far to the Left of the then-notorious Weathermen. The Weathermen, I wrote, were merely out to change the political climate, while the Seismologists sought to “fault the very bedrock of civilization.”

Though there was no immediate response, 13 years later the Ruling Class seems to have answered my challenge with customary violence. The message of the 1983 fire is unmistakable. It occurred on the same day I met with an influential editor to begin a process we reasonably believed would lead to major-media publication of “Dancer.” More pointedly, a half-melted electric clock found at the fire's origin was stopped at the exact moment we began our meeting. Though fire investigators soon backed away from their initial verdict of probable arson, such malignant synchronicity as was implicit in that silently screaming clock can hardly be coincidental. It is indeed a defining characteristic of psychological warfare. Thus I cannot escape the loathsome probability my work was destroyed by government inflicted (or at least government-sponsored) arson.

All of which turns my subsequent encounters with censorship – the newest is yet another anti-OAN embargo imposed by Comcast (the fourth to-date) – into fuel for my determination not to be silenced.

The photograph above also expresses that stance – and it does so in every sense possible. The negative was part of a batch of work salvaged in the spring of 1974 from the post-fire ashes. The image is one of a series of photos I made of the late Gene Smith – W. Eugene Smith to the photographically uninitiated – on 8 March 1976, the night he was shouted down and jeered during a reception in Seattle, the most maliciously xenophobic city in the United States. Mr. Smith's alleged sin? He tried to answer a question the small-minded Ansel Adams cultists loudly damned as “mixing politics with art.”

Mr. Smith is undoubtedly the best American photojournalist never to be known in the United States. His name is a household word everywhere else on this sad planet, but here in his homeland, his persistently anti-capitalist images got him fired by Life magazine and subsequently banished to an obscurity that – tragically – extends even unto the photographic community, which damn well should know better.

Another frame of that night's take was published to illustrate my review of Smith's superb book Let Truth Be the Prejudice; I wrote the book report as editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine. But this image shows both Smith's contemplative warmth and the relentlessly cold damage done by the flames and subsequent exposure to several months of rain. The cameras were of course M Leicas with Summicron lenses of 35mm and 50mm; this was probably with the 50. The film was Tri-X at 400 developed in D-76 diluted 1:1.

LB/28 August 2011

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